The present invention relates to an orbital shaker and in one particular aspect, to an incubating orbital shaker.
Orbital shakers are known for use in a laboratory environment to agitate an assay or test samples with a generally orbital motion. Certain orbital shakers also include a heated chamber in order to keep certain materials at a predetermined temperature during the agitation.
In the past, devices for achieving such orbital motion and heating have not provided sufficient stability and accuracy for the drive speed, which result in sample-to-sample differences that introduce additional error and uncertainty into production or test results. Additionally, for incubating orbital shakers, the incubation chambers in some known devices lack generally uniform heating resulting in test samples located in different areas of the shaking platform being heated at different temperatures. This also results in sample-to-sample variations that can be unacceptable in various types of testing.
In addition, some known orbital shakers do nothing to address unbalanced load conditions which can result in the samples being damaged and/or the orbital shaker itself walking off the edge of a laboratory table if unobserved. Additionally, in the event of spillage it is often difficult to clean the shaking platform, since it is typically directly mounted to the drive system and requires disassembly beyond that which should typically done by a user and/or can result in the drive system being unbalanced upon reassembly.